Purvis Young Folk Art Signed! Down Trodden Start Price USD 100.00 Current Price USD 100.00 Time Left - Bid Count 0 Buy It Now Price - Reserve Price - Start Time Monday, August 25, 2008 End Time Monday, September 01, 2008 Location Lookout Mountain, Tennessee See more about 'Purvis Young Folk Art Signed! Down Trodden' Description This is a great Purvis Young piece. Really beautiful and signed. Dimensions are 23" by 30". Purvis Young is among the most exciting and important self-taught artists to have emerged in the 1980’s.  He actually had some art instruction while in Raiford prison in the 1960’s and his earliest works reflect a style that predates the raw energy and direct assertiveness of his mature work.  The label “self-taught” best describes his method of working.  He rejected the training he received and opted instead to operate from gut instinct, using materials found in the streets of Overtown, Miami’s inner city.  The resulting work constitutes some of the most honest and powerful art of the last decade.   Meeting Purvis Young, one cannot help but be impressed by his deep heart-felt concern for his community and acquaintances.  The abundance of pregnant women populating the neighborhood, the hustle-and-bustle chaos of people in the street, the infusion of boat people, the trucks passing up above on the elevated interstate, funerals, basketball games and crying faces populate his oeuvre.  His materials tend to be the detritus or trash found in the streets – old books and ledgers, discarded paper, cardboard and wood, and smashed doors and mirrors, to mention but a few of Young’s “supports.”  Not only are his images about the neighborhood, but the materials come from it as well.   This “tired” and worn material has an emotional energy that reinforces the themes of his work.  And his painterly style coupled with robust, sweeping markings lends an aura of tumult, drive, preoccupation and feeling.  Young’s artistic genius is, in part, the non-specific nature of his scenes; simplified to essentials, he presents universal situations.  His figures are virtually abstract, reduced to long Franz Kline-like brushstrokes topped with a dot, suggesting body and head.  The meaning resides in the power of the marks, and not in any details.  Even Young’s homemade “frames” function less as utilitarian frame, than as a material with a real past that metaphorically lends energy, humanity and life to the painted image. E-mail me with any questions. Place a Bid!